A Mid-Year Reading List
In a time where things seem to be endlessly exhausting and impossible to keep up with, where humans are turning into machines and machines into humans, where each day brings with it some new devastation or strange turn mediated through our screens, books remain a kind of solace and escape that few other avenues can offer. To deal with the shock of half of 2025 already having passed, we decided to create a mid-year list of some of the finest books released this year that we’ve come across and enjoyed.
Natasha Brown - Universality
One night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar. A journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, a columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that squats on the farm. A thrilling new novel from the author of Assembly, this is a compelling, unsettling celebration of language and absurdity.
Omar El Akkad - One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
An urgent reckoning about what it means to live today, this book is a chronicle of Omar’s painful realisation that much of what the West promises is a lie. An acclaimed journalist and writer, El Akkad dissects his flawed hope that western democracies offered freedom and justice for all, reexamining it in the wake of the genocide in Gaza. A moral, personal journey that never veers into didacticism, it’s essential reading for our times.
Ocean Vuong - The Emperor of Gladness
One summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice is Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia. Bereft and out of options, he becomes her caretaker. Over the course of a year, the unlikely pair develop a life-altering bond built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak that illuminates contemporary America in Vuong’s signature style.
Harriet Armstrong - To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
What does it mean to be a person? In her final year of university, an unnamed narrator struggles to relate to the world and find her place in it. Drifting from lectures to exhibitions to study groups, she finds nothing to further her search for the great revelation she was promised – except, perhaps, her budding interest in fellow student Luke. A compelling new voice that has been described as an ‘anti-bildungsroman for the pandemic generation’, Armstrong queries the nature of experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman’s sense of self in prose that is observant, wry and despairing.
Katie Kitamura - Audition
In the acclaimed Katie Kitamura’s latest book, two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals. He’s attractive, troubling, young and mysterious. Who are they to one another? In this brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.
Claire Baglin - On The Clock
Writing with nimble nuance, a sly, subtle wit, and a sharp ear, Claire Baglin marks her debut in On the Clock. The novel is a compelling exploration of social inequality, immobility and a chronicle of the working class in modern day Europe. Following multiple strands, one family bumps and scrapes through life between factory work, seaside trips and parenthood, while a young woman toils at a burger chain, her tricky interactions reflecting the tyranny of the clock in, clock out life that dictates so much repetitive labour.